For green energy experts, it seems like there’s too much of a good thing right now. While it’s great that there are enough wind, solar, and battery storage projects planned to meet the United States’ climate goals, a growing bottleneck in the nation’s electric grid is keeping most of these projects grounded. The problem stems from a combination of factors: aging infrastructure, a discombobulated electrical grid that makes it difficult to get renewable energy from where it is produced to where it is needed, and the overwhelmed regulators responsible for approving the projects.
A new report by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory outlines the dilemma. The authors surveyed the nation’s seven electric grid operators and 35 major utilities, which together cover 85 percent of the US power load. They found that 1,300 gigawatts of wind, solar, and energy storage projects had been proposed as of the end of 2021, enough to meet 80 percent of the White House’s goal of carbon-free electricity generation by 2030. “There’s an energy revolution taking place in the types of power plants developers and independent power producers want to build, and the types of power plants that we as consumers are demanding,” says Joe Rand, senior scientific engineering associate at LBL and lead author of the report “Queued Up,” which was released in April.
But fewer than a quarter of the projects will ever get going, Rand says, even those that have the necessary financing, permit approvals from local jurisdictions, and contracts with utilities to sell the power. “Our transmission system is just simply under-resourced to manage this influx of new capacity,” Rand says.
Perhaps the biggest issue right now, Rand says, is that there’s no easy way to figure out how to move renewable energy from point A to point B. Part of the problem is finding ways to connect new projects to the existing grid. It’s as if there are too many renewable planes for the number of gates at the energy airport terminal. “Let’s say you want to build a 200-megawatt solar farm and there's a substation down the road,” Rand says, describing a typical scenario faced by a renewable energy developer. “No problem, I'm just going to plug into that substation. But it's not quite that simple, because when you inject 200 megawatts or any significant capacity of electricity into the grid system, it's going to cause impacts. You might need to upgrade the network, you might need to upgrade transmission lines, you might need to upgrade the substation in order to inject that capacity there.”
Those upgrades could include new transmission lines that can handle an increase in power without overheating, which can damage the lines themselves, and without causing a reduction of electricity across the length of the line. Of course, someone has to pay for these upgrades, and many state utility regulators don’t want to pass the cost on to ratepayers. At the same time, many renewable energy developers don’t want to pay for upgrades that might benefit existing fossil fuel producers.
Another part of the backup comes from the reviews needed to study this maze of electrical connections. Each of the nation’s system operators (there’s one each for California and Texas, and multistate operators for the remainder of the US) have to approve any new energy project, whether it’s a wind farm or a coal-fired power plant. This includes reviewing studies that assess the environmental and economic effects of the project, as well as how the extra energy may affect the grid, how reliable it is during peak times, and how the new power source will respond to outages or bad weather.
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The length of time needed to get through the “interconnection queue” and obtain the necessary impact studies and permits from each grid operator has risen from around 2.1 years for projects built in 2000-2010 to around 3.7 years for those built in 2011-2021, the study reported. In fact, the LBL researchers found that only 23 percent of the projects seeking grid connection between 2000 and 2016 have actually been built. The number of completed projects is declining, the report says, and it is even lower for wind and solar than for other forms of energy, such as natural gas or coal. “The grid operators have limited staff to conduct these studies,” Rand says. “Maybe they haven't ramped up their workforce quickly enough.”
The system with the biggest backlog of proposed projects awaiting approval is PJM, a regional transmission organization that covers 13 East Coast states and the District of Columbia. A spokesperson for PJM says the backlog is due to the increased interest in renewable energy, rather than any problems with the grid itself.
“Renewable resources are coming online at an escalating rate,” spokesperson Jeff Shields wrote in an email to WIRED. “PJM has more than 225,000 [megawatts] worth of projects applying to interconnect into the system—that’s more capacity than we currently have on the system, and it is approximately 95 percent solar, wind, storage, or renewable-storage hybrids. The volume of requests in PJM has essentially tripled in four years.” The line for renewable projects got so long that PJM slapped a two-year moratorium on reviewing projects that entered the queue in 2021.
Shields says one reason for the boom in proposals is that big corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and General Motors are adopting decarbonization goals that require renewable energy, while individual consumers are also seeking to lower emissions. PJM stakeholders met last week to approve new rules to streamline the approval process and to clear a backlog of 1,200 power proposals by early 2024, according to Shields. The new rules will allow PJM to approve projects that are ready first, rather than those that have been waiting longer but may not have the required financing and permits. “That means that a project that is ready to move forward won’t get stuck behind a less-ready project,” Shields wrote.
PJM only generates about 6 percent of its total power mix from renewable sources. California’s independent system operator, CAISO, which gets about one-third of its energy from renewables like solar and wind, is also experiencing a bottleneck in approving proposed renewable energy plants. The CAISO interconnection queue has “ballooned with so many projects that it exceeds CAISO’s ability to process it,” according to an October 2021 report by Grid Strategies, a power-sector consulting firm.
Last week, officials at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proposed new rules to help ease the transition to renewable projects for operators like CAISO and PJM. The rules would require transmission providers to plan for future renewable energy demand and supply over the next 20 years, and to update those plans every three years. They would also reform who will pay for upgrades to the grid. After receiving comments for 75 days, FERC officials are expected to vote on the rules later this year.
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Another problem is that there are not enough electrical lines to move the energy to where it's needed. A briefing paper issued in April by the Department of Energy found that the number of newly built high-voltage transmission lines has declined from an annual average of 2,000 miles in 2012-2016 to an average of just 700 miles in 2017-2021.
Some analysts and renewable energy advocates say Congress and the White House should have taxpayers fund upgrades to the grid to make it easier to send renewable power from the sunny Southwest or windy Great Plains to big coastal cities, for example, without running new lines through suburban streets, farmland, or forests. One idea is to run high-voltage DC power lines along railroads or interstate highways. Energy developers have been pushing this idea for several years, and it may see the light of day under President Joe Biden’s jobs plan, which targets 20 high-voltage long-distance transmission projects but is stalled in the US Senate.
The infrastructure bill Congress passed in November includes $2.5 billion to boost transmission and designate “national electric transmission corridors,” plus $3 billion to develop advanced transmission technologies. These include automated software to predict the ability of the lines to move power during bad weather, known as dynamic line rating; power flow control devices; and electric conductors that can handle greater volumes of electricity without failing.
There’s another solution to the current transmission mess, according to Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. He wants to see more rooftop solar panels on commercial buildings, as well as more offshore wind turbines near coastal cities, since their power cables would not have to travel through multiple jurisdictions or across private or public lands.
Installing smaller green energy systems quickly will buy policymakers and regulators more time to approve bigger, slower, more expensive utility-scale projects. “That's an advantage of rooftop solar,” Jacobson says. “You can put it up faster.”
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